


This Needs to Be Perfect

by Adaris



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bread, Coming out in order to make a joke, Evan has a favorite tree and it's the rainbow tree, Gratuitous driving with the windows down, I wish there was a self-harm/depression warning because I'd check that box, Internal monologue but it's all anxiety-fueled, Leaning against a car to make yourself look cooler, M/M, The boys get Real talking about their feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 10:49:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16116857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adaris/pseuds/Adaris
Summary: Evan breaks his arm falling out of a tree at a party. Then he meets the tree's owner, Connor Murphy, and it all goes pear-shaped.





	1. The Most Amazing Trees

The party sucked. Connor sulked like a champion in the corner of his own house while Zoe laughed and danced, Jared made unrepeatable jokes to embarrassed sophomores, and Alanna tried to fit as many Pringles in her mouth as possible. No one actually talked to _him_ , though. Eventually, the booming music started to grate on his nerves, and he made his escape to the back yard. Party lights were strung up along the back fence, but otherwise the music was much softer and there were fewer people. He sighed in relief and flopped down underneath the large pine tree in the yard, where he was mostly hidden by the branches. No one was going to bother him there.

Connor’s watch ticked slowly towards two and people started to filter out, until he was left alone. The moon was a slim crescent, barely glowing through the clouds in the pitch black illuminated solely by the party lights, which Zoe turned off.

“Come back inside and help me clean all this up!” she yelled, waving at him through the screen door. “I am _not_ doing this alone.”

“Whatever!” he shouted back to her. He scowled thunderously at his own shoes, but eventually forced himself to stand up and wander back into the house. Otherwise Zoe would nag, and she was an expert nagger who put both their parents to shame. As soon as he stepped inside, he heard a muffled thud from the yard, a sharp crack, and a yelp of pain.

“What was that?” Zoe shouted from upstairs.

Connor shrugged, because how on Earth was he supposed to know? And then he realized she couldn’t see him shrug, so he offered to go check it out.  

“Cool, but don’t forget to help me clean up. Teens these days, right?” Zoe did finger-guns at him and disappeared back upstairs.

When Connor went back outside, he found a random kid sitting underneath the pine tree, cradling his left arm to his chest. “Who the hell are you?” he snapped.

 

—

 

 _I love trees, but not like this_ , Evan thought desperately as he clung to the sticky branch of the eastern white pine in Connor Murphy’s back yard. Climbing the tree had been a last-ditch attempt to escape the party while not actually leaving it. Leaving early would have made Jared super annoyed, because Evan was Jared’s ride back home, and Evan hated it when people were unhappy with him. But no one would bother a kid in a tree, right?

His plan would probably have worked had Connor Murphy not decided that the grass underneath Evan’s tree was a perfect place to sit around and sulk. Connor hadn’t moved the rest of the night, effectively trapping Evan in the tree and preventing him from fulfilling his duties as designated driver.

After Jared had left the party in someone else’s car, signaling the true end of the festivities, Connor finally went inside. But Evan realized that he _still_ couldn’t get back down because the yard was pitch black. His phone was dead, the house lights weren’t enough to actually illuminate the tree, and he’d be stuck there until morning unless he did something.

Why did he agree to go to any kind of party on a Sunday? Everyone knew that the days to party were Friday and Saturday!

“Aw, heck,” Evan swore, surprising even himself. He fumbled in the dark for a branch to step on, but his foot missed with perfect inelegance, and he tumbled out of the tree with a startled yelp.

“What was that?” Zoe shouted from inside the house.

Evan scrambled to his feet and immediately fell back down on his butt, staring at the sky. While he tried to assemble the words in his brain to describe exactly how much his arm hurt, even worse than that one time he stubbed his toe on the corner of a bookcase, someone came out of the house. None of it really processed for Evan until an unfamiliar voice demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

“Uh, I’m nobody! I gotta go!” Evan stood up but braced his arm on the ground, and it felt like he was getting actively stabbed. Before he could burst into tears, the social anxiety kicked in and Evan said, “Well that stung!” too loud instead of literally anything else.

Connor Murphy, Zoe’s brother ( _How were both of them so attractive? Unfair!_ a secret part of Evan’s brain pouted), was staring at him like he was insane; although he was one to talk, wearing black jeans, black boots, and a black hoodie featuring a large green leaf on the chest. Evan sensed he had something of a theme going on, although he wasn’t sure what the leaf was about. “Were you up there all this time?”

Evan nodded wordlessly. If he opened his mouth, he’d probably seriously embarrass himself. Again.

“Um… is your arm okay?” Connor asked from a safe distance. He was frowning, either out of concern or annoyance.

“Yep, everything’s—” Evan squeaked in pain and tried to stand back up again, but with his good arm pinning the probably broken one to his chest, he didn’t actually manage to get very far.

Connor rolled his eyes, but he helped Evan stand up and squinted at him in the darkness. “Hey, can you drive?”

“Course I can, what’re you talking about?” Evan stumbled towards his car, wondering if this was what drunk people felt like but with less excruciating arm pain. “I’m fine.” When he finally reached his car after walking around the entirety of Connor’s house under careful scrutiny, Evan tried to take his keys out of his pocket.

Connor watched as Evan fumbled with the keys and opening the door and not moving his right arm for what felt like half an hour before he sighed, shaggy hair falling into his face as he grabbed the keys from Evan. “Okay, then I’ll drive. I’ll get the side door for y—”

“Um, thank you, but you don’t have to do that. It’ll be fine. Don’t even think about it,” Evan insisted, switching into panic mode. Well, this was one of his worst nightmares. Maybe he should’ve panicked before now, back when someone saw him literally fall out of a tree. Was this getting weird? It was definitely already weird, but Evan felt like everything he did was only contributing to that. Maybe he should stop staring so much at Connor’s heavy eyeliner. Not that it looked bad or anything, it was just something Evan would never have chosen. At all. Nope. No makeup for him, it was too much effort!

“You know what, you’ve been staring at me for about three minutes too long looking like you’re trying to solve a geometric proof in your head. Get in; I’ll drive.” Connor’s expression left no room for negotiation, and rather than stir up a fuss, Evan got into the passenger’s seat of his own car. Which was actually his mom’s car, which she would want tomorrow morning.

Recipe.

For.

Disaster.

Evan held back a sob the entire time, although because he’d just broken his arm or was in the car with a complete stranger was anyone’s guess. At least the constant fear of doing something totally weird was keeping his mind off the weird color purple his arm was turning, and how weirdly swimmy the world was getting. And how many times the word _weird_ was starting to apply to his life.

“Are you doing okay?” Connor asked without taking his eyes off the road. “We’re almost there.”

“Yeah, everything’s great, awesome,” Evan managed to say. The car hit a pothole, and a squeak escaped from him when his arm moved.

Connor raised an eyebrow as he pulled into the ER, parking casually as if they were about to get groceries or something. “Let’s go, I’m not carrying you.”

“Awesome.” Evan shuffled into the relatively clean white building after Connor, who was opening the automatic doors like a gentleman. Probably. He was also on his phone, texting Zoe about where he’d went. Then he took a selfie as proof, which also included Evan. Even though Evan tried hard not to look like a deer caught in the headlights, it didn’t work. 

Inside, the hospital was packed full of people, as if everyone with a problem had decided that now, two AM on a Monday, was the time to do something about it. What did people _do_ on Sundays? _Fall out of other people’s trees_ , Evan mused to himself.

“Hello, hello,” a nurse said in a harried tone, barely looking at them as she made them both sit down in the only empty chairs left in the waiting room. “I’ll get an ice pack for you. There are a lot of people already waiting for the X-ray, so you might have to wait. Bit of a wait for everything, actually. ‘Specially the bathroom. If I were you—”

A pager in her pocket buzzed, and another nurse swapped places with her, giving Evan an ice pack and painkillers while Connor scrolled through Tumblr on his phone. Connor’s phone case was black, to no one’s surprise, inlaid with silver sparkles. A sticker with the words _SOME PLANTS ARE ILLEGAL. PLANTS!_ was splashed across the back. And there was another sticker of a leaf on top of that one.

“Anything interesting?” Evan asked, but Connor only grunted in response and kept scrolling.

Evan sighed and tapped his feet on the ground, wishing he could scroll through his phone too, but couldn’t because he didn’t have enough hands. Without really thinking, he peeled back the ice pack and started poking at his arm, which had turned reasonably numb by now. The skin was mostly dark purple, mottled with blue and yellow at the edges. Huh, was that green? Weird. He even had a few bright red scrapes from where he’d scraped against the tree bark on his way down.

“Wow, that’s a rainbow of nope,” Connor commented.

“Yeah, almost as gay as me.” Oh no, what made him say that?! That was going to make everything really awkward. As if things weren’t awkward already. But seriously, why did he have such a big problem not saying embarrassing things? Was it some sort of innate compulsion, driving him to be a complete idiot? _Rainbows_ , Evan scowled in his own head, while maintaining a very strained smile on the outside.

Connor frowned at Evan’s arm, scrutinizing the bruises. “Yeah, same.”

They both locked eyes in absolute shock. 

“Did we just come out to each other?” Evan whispered, glancing furtively around the room. Everyone else was busy with their own problems and didn’t take the slightest notice.

“I think we just did.” Connor cracked a faint smile at Evan for the first time all night, which Evan definitely noticed. More than he’d ever noticed anything before, besides falling out of a tree.  

Evan turned bright ruby red and smiled at his feet. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a disaster after all.


	2. Maybe There's a Reason

“So… you like trees?” Connor asked in the tone of a person whose closest interaction with nature was with plastic pine trees at Christmas.

Evan nodded, not even trying to stop the smile that spread across his face. “They’re actually really cool! I’ve read a lot of forestry books and things, and I could probably name every kind of tree that grows locally. Like, the one I fell out of, that’s an eastern white pine.” He stared down at his broken arm, which no one had bothered to treat yet.

That made Connor raise an eyebrow, a talent Evan seriously envied. “Huh. I guess now’s not the time to tell you that I thought there was just one kind of pine. You got a favorite type of tree?”

“Rainbow eucalyptus,” Evan answered without pausing, because of course he had a favorite. “ _Eucalyptus deglupta_. It’s the only type of eucalyptus that’s native to the northern hemisphere, and it has this really cool rainbow-colored bark.”

Connor considered that for a moment and then asked, “Did you like the trees before or after you knew you were gay?”

“Hah, um, before, I guess. I’m more bisexual than gay, but that isn’t really something I think very hard about.” There were enough things for Evan to worry about without having to add sexuality to the mix, which was a black hole of confusing feelings he was feeling and feelings he wasn’t feeling, or feelings he just couldn’t really place. In general, feelings were not his strong suit.

“Me neither. Let’s just say that my family isn’t really into the whole ‘sharing’ thing.” Connor rubbed at one of his eyes, smearing his eyeliner terribly.

“You, uh, have some… um,” Evan said with Olympic vagueness. “On your… um.’

Connor frowned and slowly reached up towards one eye. “Is it smudged?”

 _Why was that so hard to say?_ “Majorly smudged.”

“Ugh.” Connor used his phone like a mirror to inspect the damage but apparently didn’t seem to think it was a problem. “Close enough.”

Although he rarely looked at anybody for very long, Evan had never noticed Connor before. Maybe it was because Connor usually hung back in class, never pulled much drama, and didn’t talk to anyone either. But he wasn’t terrible to look at. His hair was especially nice, Evan decided, and it looked soft and shiny. The eyeliner would also have been very attractive if it wasn’t messed up. He wished that he could wipe away the smudged part and reapply the eyeliner, which was definitely a weird wish, and now it was making his ears turn hot and bright red.

Connor noticed Evan staring, and they both glanced away from each other at anything else.

“Kinda warm in here, huh?” Connor pushed up his sleeves, and Evan had to do a double take. What were the lines marking the inside of Connor’s forearms? They looked almost like scars.

Noticing Evan’s gaze, Connor swore and tugged them back down. “You saw _nothing_ , Hansen,” he snapped.

“Oh, I—well I kind of—um—I’m sorry, I just kind of see things that I see!” Evan wailed in utter despair. “I can’t unsee things or unremember them!”

Connor scowled, his hair falling in a curtain over his eyes. “Hey, calm down, man. Don’t draw any attention over here.”

“Why did… how did you get those scars?” Evan whispered as quietly as he could. “Was it… you know?”

“Fuck.” Connor flipped his phone over in his hands again and again. “Yeah. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

Evan felt like someone had just punched him in the stomach, even though they weren’t even friends (but now he wasn’t sure; were they friends? Maybe they could be, unless he’d totally ruined that possibility ten seconds ago, but they could be friends again unless they were still friends and… he cut that line of thought off before he got any more confused). “Connor, why would you do that?” he asked without even thinking; usually, he watched every single word he said.

Connor wouldn’t look at Evan, instead choosing to pick at his already chipped black nail polish. “Because depression makes you do weird stuff, and it feels pretty logical in the moment.”

“Oh, um, that would do it,” Evan squawked while trying to sound sensitive, voice climbing a magnificent octave and making him sound like a kid. He was already awful in social situations, but this was way out of his pay grade. Which was saying a lot, because he didn’t get paid.

“You’re a pretty high-strung person, Evan Hansen.”

Evan stifled a weird, panicked laugh. “Yeah, that’d be the social anxiety. I am _never_ relaxed.”

“Not to obviously redirect the conversation, but what’s anxiety like?” Connor asked.

Evan hummed, drumming the fingers of his good hand on his leg. “Uh, it’s like having a voice in your head screaming all the time about nothing in particular no matter what’s going on. Or whatever. Mine is mostly about social interaction.”

“Oh, so you were in the tree because you were too awkward to be at the party and also to come down from the tree while I was under it,” Connor realized. “Huh, relatable. If I’d known you were up there, I might have joined you.”

That made Evan flush pink for reasons he couldn’t name, and he couldn’t find the words to respond. “That’s pretty much exactly why I was in the tree. The harder I try to avoid social stress, the more it seems to find me,” he managed to say before he gathered the courage to ask, “What’s depression like?”

Connor raked one hand through his hair and then worried at the edges of his sleeves, tugging them down over his hands so they were completely hidden. “Like nothing. I mean, sometimes I’m angry about nothing, but mostly I just feel nothing. Which sucks.”

Understanding hit Evan like an oncoming train. “So that’s why you started—”

“Yeah.” Connor hunched in on himself, wrapping his arms around his body. He really was gangly, all the height in his long legs. “Sometimes I want to feel anything, even if it’s not a great feeling. Weird kind of logic. I’d, um, really appreciate if you didn’t tell anyone. I’m not ready for people to know—I barely even know why I told you.”

Evan made an awkward huff, halfway between a laugh and a hiccup. “Well, I don’t talk to people, ever, so your secret’s safe. Maybe you knew that.” But also, Evan really felt like this was information he couldn’t afford to keep secret. Then again, who would he tell? When was he going to tell them? Could he violate Connor’s trust like that?

“I mean… you’re talking to me, aren’t you?” Connor asked. “It’s not like I’m a ghost.”

“No, you’re not a ghost.” Evan tried to laugh, but couldn’t, and he stared at his own hands.

Connor sighed. “We’re really something, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, I guess we are." 

“And we really should talk about something else. Like, um…” Connor fished around mentally for anything else. “You like bread?”

Evan squinted in confusion. “I mean, I guess it’s alright. I like it as toast.”

“What about bread, like, just plain regular bread? Rye, pumpernickel, sourdough. Any opinions?” Connor was so serious that Evan laughed, the first genuine laugh he’d had in a long time.

“I like the bread that’s swirled, half pumpernickel and half regular. I used to think it looked like a galaxy.”

“That’s a nice bread, Hansen,” Connor answered gravely, and then he laughed too.

Whatever Connor was going to say about bread was lost when someone interrupted by saying, “Evan Hansen? We’re ready for you now.”

Evan stood up even though he didn't want to. “Oh, okay, thank you. See you in a bit, I guess, Connor.”

“Yep. I’ll be here.” Connor smiled again, and Evan wanted to see him smile even more. He wanted the both of them to have reasons to smile.

 

—

 

“Okay, forget sitting in silence; we’re listing to music,” Connor decided once they were back in Evan’s mom’s car. Evan was sporting an arm wrapped in a thick white and blue cast, which was already starting to itch. “What’s in the glovebox?”

Evan fidgeted with the cast, even though he knew he shouldn’t. Would he be able to change shirts alright? The last thing he wanted was to be trapped in this blue striped one forever. People would notice, and it would be awkward. “The glovebox? Um, we listen to the radio mostly, so it’s just tissues and the registration in there.”

“Okay, fine, radio it is, but now you’re going to have to suffer through… my music choices!” Connor turned on the radio and started flicking through the stations. Most of them were static or commercials, because it was three or four in the morning, but they did have good old country music.

Connor tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to the music even though he didn’t know the words, rolling down the window and letting the night air ruffle his hair. He started to pick up the tune and hummed along.

Evan’s heart was beating too fast, and it wasn’t because he’d just broken his arm. It felt like the rest of the world had faded away and all there was in the world was this car, and this moment, and Connor Murphy singing as he drove.

And then they were singing, making up the words, and the words didn’t make sense, but it didn’t matter. Connor laughed, one hand raking through his hair as they drove through town without another car in sight, and Evan’s heart squeezed painfully, but it was the happiest feeling he had ever felt. It wasn’t confusing like everything else seemed to be, and he wanted it to go on forever.

Evan had until his phone chimed to let them know that they’d arrived back at his house. “Hey, um, what are you going to do? Walk back home?” Evan asked as they got out of the car.

“It’s not that far. And I can always call an Uber or whatever they’re called if it starts getting really late, and Zoe knows to leave the back door open.” Connor scuffed his toe along the edge of Evan’s driveway. “I’ve lived in this town forever, so I think I could get back home with a blindfold.”

“Yeah… weird to think that we’ll both be leaving at the end of this year. More school.” Evan sighed and tried to lean against the car casually, but he couldn’t quite get the hang of it.

Connor didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were focused on the moon, which wasn’t quite a half and wasn’t quite full. A ribbon moon? Gibbon moon? Evan’s mind was spinning with moon facts before he processed Connor saying, “I think I’ll take a gap year before I do any college.”

“Wow, what would you do? Like… work, or—” Evan’s mind scraped the bottom of the barrel of things he knew about gap years. “Um, travel?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If I could, I’d bike the Appalachian trail, maybe,” he ventured as if this were some unattainable dream, something he would never really get to do.

“Or you could write a book?” Evan suggested. “Learn to sail?” What did people do with their lives again?

“Yeah, that would be cool. Maybe I’ll do all of those.” Connor sighed and ruffled his hair. “Anyway, I won’t keep you.”

Evan stood up too fast, just as Connor started to walk back into the street. They stopped too close to each other, so close that Evan could see the clean black lines of Connor’s eyeliner, and also the smudges. Connor smelled like ice cream, like the strawberry kind made with chunks of berries in it. Sweet and cold and so, so nice.

“You aren’t keeping me from anything important,” Evan said quietly. And then he went for the cool ‘leaning against the car’ thing again, except this time he slammed his broken arm directly into the car and let out a yelp of pain that startled the both of them.

“Whoa, are you okay?” Connor asked, hands dusting over Evan’s shoulders to make sure everything was fine.

“Yep, I’m okay. You okay?” Evan asked out of some weird courtesy reflex and immediately regretted it.

Connor let out a huff that was almost a laugh. “Yeah, we’re okay. Um, see you at school, I guess.”

They both stared at the ground for longer than they should have, Evan desperately thinking of anything smooth and clever to say, but by the time he’d thought of something, Connor had vanished.


	3. When I Looked Up

The next day, Evan fidgeted nervously on the bus to school, which wasn’t unusual in and of itself, but the object of his worry was different this time. As he trudged in through the double doors near the swimming pool and opened his locker, Evan could only think about last night, which was kind of this morning, and Connor Murphy.

He stacked his binders in alphabetic order inside the locker and then shoved all of his English books into his backpack. They landed in an untidy heap of pages, and Evan’s little sprout-shaped bookmark fluttered to the floor, but he didn’t notice.

Would everything be different today? As hard as he tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Actually, it was probably all the trying that pushed that question to the forefront of his mind, like waves lapping at the shore or whatever. Connor was in his English class, always sitting in the back and always late, so when Evan went inside the room, he knew that Connor wouldn’t be there. Evan looked anyway, and his mood deflated the instant he saw that the chair in the back was empty.

Next to Evan’s usual seat, Jared was hunched over a water bottle full of orange juice, dark sunglasses completely covering his eyes. “Morning, Evan,” he said, looking over the rims of his glasses. “You get home alright? Where did you go?”

“Uh, last night? Um, well…” Evan trailed off. How had last night been?

The classroom door opened, and a familiar shape wearing all-black shuffled in and slipped quietly towards the back. Evan couldn’t help but stare, hoping for some kind of acknowledgement, anything.

Connor slouched in his chair, a battered notebook and pencil in front of him, eyes fixed on the floor.

“Knock-knock, is anybody in there?” Jared waved in front of Evan’s face, then seemed to notice Evan’s arm for the first time. “Hey, whoa. How did you break your arm, Evan?”

“Wh-what?” he stuttered, still distracted and definitely flat-out staring at Connor.

Jared rolled his eyes. “How did you break your arm?”

The entire classroom fell silent for a moment, even the clock and the sound of Jared’s chair scraping across the floor.

Connor looked up at Evan and smiled. It was small and shy, but to Evan, it was as bright as the sun.

“Well,” Evan said, starting to smile too, “It’s kind of a funny story.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! Let me know what you think—this is my first fanfic, and I would really appreciate the feedback! Thank you for reading <3


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